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Freedom to pierce
Ruthie and I tagged along to watch two of our colleagues, Dasha and Nastia, report on a story about a piercing festival in the Selmash region of Rostov.
The gist of the festival was as follows: show up to a smoky, underground bar, drink some beer, listen to club music and watch a few brave souls get pierced on a stage. It’s a theatrical flipping off of “the man,” a bit of (painful) self-expression that scoffs in the face of Russian tradition and norms.
Dasha and Nastia spoke with a self-proclaimed satanist, who said that she was getting pierced as an expression of her protest against society (to Dasha and Nastia she said, “I’m against you as representatives of this society”). The counterculture in Rostov is comparable to that of goth or punk culture in small town U.S.A. - it sticks out like a sore thumb and the locals are afraid of what these kids represent. There was definitely a sense of frustration and disenfranchisement among the festival attendees - a sense that traditional Russian society and the country’s current political direction have little place for them.
I was pretty much ready for anything - I mean, it was a piercing festival - but I didn’t imagine that the first piercing of the night would involve a sensitive female body part. But the goal of the night was to shock, and yet have the piercing seem blase: you’re either “in” or “out” depending on your response. Throughout the evening we watched a series of “heroes,” as our Russian colleagues called them, suck it up and grimace through the pain as they got their noses, tongues and arms pierced.
We’re looking forward to the small television news piece that Dasha and Nastia are putting together. It was a great story find and these women weren’t afraid to get up into people’s faces and film all the gory details as each particpant was punctured in the name of art and freedom.
Filed under: Reporting Rostov